Hoax: ACES and indie film
Peder Morgenthaler is a long time Tiger Store user. We learn of his latest project in an article recently published in Randi Altman’s Post Perspective. Here’s an extract where he discusses his storage setup:
Having the right storage is important to the ACES workflow, since 16-bit OpenEXR at 4K is around 45MB per frame, or just over 1,000 MBps at 24 fps to play back in realtime, says Morgenthaler. “Not all storage can do that.” Morgenthaler, who consults with Seagate on their storage systems for post, relied on a Seagate RealStor shared storage system with 144TB of fibre channel storage. “The file sharing is based off of Tiger Technology’s Tiger Store, which enables simultaneous access for all users on the network at full quality and resolution,” he says “That greatly increased the efficiency of our workflow. It meant instant collaboration between team members, with no syncing of separate drives required to maintain collaboration.” In total, the production generated 44 hours of footage and ended up with 19.5TB of total data, not including visual effects.
Image File Sequence workflows are difficult because each frame is a file. The storage must therefore deliver 24 files per second, and these files are often scattered all over the drive because they have been rendered at different times. Significant performance is lost when drive’s heads must continuously jump around to read a new frame.
Tiger Store’s Automatic Defragmentation engine and Image File Sequence optimizer makes it an ideal choice for demanding color grading applications such as ACES, Resolve, Scratch, FilmLight, Nucoda, etc. because it re-aligns all frames sequentially on the storage, thereby ensuring the smoothest possible playback.